The Sweet, Dirty Music of Expansion: C/D Is Growing

More space for us, more options for you.

July 2017 By EDDIE ALTERMAN Photos By MICHAEL SIMARI

0shares

From the August 2017 issue

As I write this letter, reciprocating saws and nail guns are cacophonating in the background, making the sweet, dirty music of expansion. We’ve blown out the north wall of our office to take over the adjacent two spaces, adding a little breathing room for the talent we’ve been adding on the digital side—including the great Rich Ceppos, returning to C/D after 26 years. If you’ve visited our website lately, you’ll know why. We are in the process of transforming caranddriver.com from the industry’s best and most comprehensive news-and-reviews site to what we’re sure will be its best and most comprehensive automotive decision-making tool for shoppers and enthusiasts alike.

To put numbers to things, we’ve gone from meas­uring about 20 automotive attributes in our testing, most of them dynamic (zero-to-60, cornering grip, sound levels), to analyzing more than 200—everything from outward visibility (a must in these fulsomely pillared times) to location and number of USB ports (another must in these days of kids in the rear seats looking for places to charge their phones).

Our most recent order of business was to add vehicle listings, displaying new- and used-car inventory to match your research. Our product and technology teams, headquartered in Atlanta, along with the partners in our ad-sales network, Jumpstart Automotive Media, made it so. We’re bad, we’re nationwide. And over the next year, we’ll be adding more tools and functionality to take you all the way from awareness of a vehicle to its driver’s seat.

There’s precedent for this. Back in the days before the internet, when the Earth’s crust was cooling, our magazine was not only the final authority on new cars, it was a sort of crude shopping tool for those who were in the market for a vehicle. Back in the days of newsstands, readers would grab it off the rack and then retire to their caves to read, by the light of burning tallow, the preview of the car that interested them. Then, hopefully, they’d come back the next month to read the road test of said car, then the comparison test. It took months to get the whole story.

Now, with the time compression afforded by digital media, you can research, compare, and, ultimately, trade your car and make a deal online within a week. Our re-platformed and rebuilt site will pull all those tasks together into one cohesive experience that allows you to discover and price your perfect vehicle, on your schedule, on the device of your choosing. All along the way, we will be there, giving you the kind of objective testing for which we’ve become famous and the subjective recommendations for which we’ve become feared. Should be fun.